The owner of Twitter and some of its most avid users are at war over the platform.
Last night, several well-known journalists, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times and Drew Harwell of The , were suspended from Twitter.
The suspensions were ostensibly related to the journalists’ reporting on an account—@ElonJet, operated by the 20-year-old Jack Sweeney—which was dedicated to publishing the location of Elon Musk’s private jet based on public data. Musk had once promised that his commitment to free speech would prevent him from ever suspending or banning @ElonJet, but he pivoted this week after an apparently unrelated alleged stalking incident.
On Wednesday, Twitter made a policy change that expanded the company’s definition of doxxing to include “real-time location info,” and last night, Musk tweeted that the suspended accounts “posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates,” suggesting that either the jet tracker or the journalists who were talking about it had endangered his life. He also showed up briefly in a live audio chat hosted by the BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos in Twitter Spaces. During that conversation, he claimed that at least one of the suspended journalists, Harwell, had been tweeting direct links to his address. Harwell, who was able to participate in the Space despite his suspension, possibly due to a technical glitch, refuted this, saying that he had only linked to @ElonJet while talking about it in a journalistic capacity and never made any mention of Musk’s address. (If the conversation weren’t between a journalist and a famous billionaire, it would be a boring moderation quibble.)
Musk didn’t engage with the distinction, and spent most of his time in the chat explaining his attitude toward journalists on Twitter. “There is not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists, so-called journalists, and regular people,” Musk said, in part. “Everyone is going to be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist.” Soon after, he left the chat, and then the Twitter Spaces feature went down across the entire site, ending Notopoulos’s stream. (Musk has said this was due to a bug.) Twitter no longer has a communications department, and an email sent last night to Ella Irwin, its new head of trust and safety, went unanswered. (She sent a comment to Reuters: “I understand that the focus seems mainly to be on journalist accounts but we applied the policy equally to journalist and non-journalist accounts today.
